Every year I had to make so many difficult decisions about what to teach. Of course I was responsible for the district Kindergarten curriculum, which was based on State Benchmarks, which were developed from National Standards; but I had choices about HOW to teach that curriculum. In Kindergarten much of the curriculum can be taught or reinforced through lots of different units. I always tried to integrate math and language arts into our science and social studies units, and I loved to spend time on topics that my children were interested in. But from year to year I switched off some units, and lengthened or shortened some, depending on lots of specific factors. Some years I spent quite a lot of time on Fire Safety and Fire prevention, other years I just hit the main points. Rachel is already planning her fall units, and asked for some ideas – so here goes!

I usually began a unit by thinking through what I wanted the children to learn, and came up with 5-6 important ideas. For Fire Safety, like lots of other units – I loved to introduce these facts with a puppet. You could use a bear puppet who might come and tell about his “cousin” Smokey the Bear, or a dog puppet – talking about Dalmatians and how they are sometimes called Fire Dogs. A puppet is always an effective way to share information with young children. You might want to make a fire hat from a red foam sheet or construction paper – I will include some simple patterns that you could resize on a copy machine to fit your puppet.

Your puppet might bring along a backpack or something to hold pictures of things like a smoke alarm and fire extinguisher, a fire engine, or telephone to call 911. If you ever come across tiny replicas of these things that would be even better! I found these cute pictures online:

You could even turn these into stick puppets. Here is a suggestion of things you could tell children about them:rules

You might like to make Fireman Fingerpuppets. You could use one to share information, then when the children make one you could encourage them to talk abou fire safety too!

Some years our local fire department would bring a fire truck to school, occasionally we took a field trip to a fire station. Even when we didn’t have a chance to see a fire fighter in person I would talk about the protective clothing they wore, and how their face might be covered, and the noise of the air tanks.

I included the main points I wanted my class to remember in this book. Through the unit we would discuss and read about lots of other elements of fire prevention, but these were my main focus. I sent home a note telling parents we were discussing fire safety and encouraging them to make a family plan, and find a safe meeting place.

We would practice touching the door with the back of our hand, and talked about the importance of closing your bedroom door at night.

I read a fun suggestion to take a piece of roll paper and have the class color it to look like smoke. Then 2 adults could hold the edges of the paper and the children could crawl under it – as a reminder that they need to stay low to breathe more easily.

We would talk about the importance of helping a Fire Fighter find you, and that even though you might be scared you would never hide.

We would practice Stop, Drop and Roll. I made flames from orange, yellow and red felt glued together. I put a flame on a child’s clothing and they had to demonstrate this technique. They loved it!

We would talk about how you wait until you are safely away from a fire to call 911. We also talked about the word emergency – and how important it is to know your address to tell the fire department.

I put tiny picture cues on most pages to help the children figure out what the page says. You might want to do this entire book at one time, or just one page a day. Here are the clipart pictures I used:

Dramatic play was a very important part of my classroom – I already shared our Fire Safety play but here are a few pictures.

I turned our play center into a fire station – these “fire fighters” were answering an emergency call. I found an old red jacket they used for a uniform.

I cut off a length of an old garden hose. These children are sitting on “Benchley” as a fire engine – other times it was a car, plane, train, etc.

I gave a full description under the Play heading on my blog, but the fire hydrant was a gas pump covered with paper. The burning building was a magnet board – the kids drew an apartment or office building and I taped it over the magnet board. Then I put magnets on felt flames. They could pretend to put out the fire and remove the flames.

Here are some song ideas – I did not make these up, but I am not sure where they originated, sorry!

Here is another idea that someone shared with me – near the end of your unit, set up a maze using tables, chairs and classroom props. You could give children the choice of being blindfolded, to simulate not being able to see in heavy smoke. The children would crawl on their hands and knees through the obstacle course and then you could have a designated “safe” place in the classroom that they would run to, to meet up with the rest of the class.

Here is one version of the story of Smokey the Bear.

If you choose to talk about Smokey, or use a bear puppet, you might want to try this activity. Each child could hold a simple bear shape with a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other. You could read scenarios like these and the children show whether it would make Smokey happy or sad.

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Oh, my goodness are you a wealth of information! Please come out of retirement, move to NY and become my son’s kindergarten teacher???!! You must have been so well loved by your students and their parents! Thank you for all that you share..

Some very creative stuff in this post about teaching fire safety to the younger guys. I like the use of puppet characters to get the ideas across, it keeps it fun and keeps their interest in the subject. If the interest in the subject is set early on in life, then it’s easier to recall an interest in fire safety later on in life, which ultimately saves lives. We should all get creative like this 🙂

Stumbled across this on accident while planning for my Scout den of first graders to prepare for our upcoming fire station visit while completing our My Community unit. THANK YOU!!!! YOU ROCK!!! And I will be sharing your info with our entire Pack to use for future Tiger dens. I will be doing this in the spirit of Pay it Forward by the way and not trying to steal it. I hope that’s ok. I will definately be following you from now on!! 🙂